Lecture 8 - Leadership Flashcards
What’s the definition of leadership?
- The process by which one individual influences other group members toward the attainment of group goals
- Beneficial to the group
What’s the ‘Great Person’ Theory?
- A type of trait theory
- Describes how a good leader is an attractive tall male, with a superior physique and has high-energy
What are some common characteristics described in trait theories?
- Drive
- Honesty and integrity
- Leadership motivation
- Self-confidence
- Cognitive ability
- Knowledge of business
- Creativity
- Flexibility
What are some of the major criticisms of trait theories?
- There are many examples where leaders are successful despite the absence of some of the major traits (ex. Stephen Hawking)
- The effect sizes of these characteristics are quite small
What are the two major behavioural dimensions often described in behaviour theory?
1) Initiating structure (task-oriented; performance; concern for production)
2) Consideration (relationship-oriented; maintenance; concern for people)
What were the five types of management described in the leadership grid?
- Country club environment (high concern for people, low concern for production)
- Team management (both high concern for production and people)
- Middle-of-the-road management (average concern for people and production)
- Task management (high concern for production, low concern for people)
- Impoverished management (both low concern for people and production)
What do charismatic/transformational leaders do?
- Articulate a clear vision
- Galvanize their followers (form a shared vision)
-Communicate high-performance standards - Inspirational
What’s transactional leadership?
- Rely on rewards and punishments
- Task-oriented
- Ex. Steve Jobs
What’s passive leadership?
- Minimum guidance or input
- Only jump in when things go wrong
- Management by exception (MBE)
- Generates negative feelings in subordinates
- Laissez-faire leadership
What’s public service leadership?
- Dominant leadership approach
- Team work
- Engagement
- Accountability
- Low-risk taking
- Renewal
- Popular in government jobs
What are the four I’s of transformational leadership?
- Idealized influence (II) - collective mission (sense of belonging)
- Inspirational motivation (IM) - vision of the future
- Intellectual stimulation (IS) - look at problems from many different angles
- Individualized consideration (IC) - the leader spends time teaching and coaching
What are some of the contingencies that impact leader behaviour, and by proxy employee behaviour as well?
- Group characteristics
- Leaders characteristics
- Employee characteristics
- Org. structure characteristics
What’s the cognitive resource theory?
- Developed by Fiedler and Garcia, 1987
- Contingencies included leader intelligence, leader experience, and stressfulness of the situation
- Discovered that workers with high experience work best in stressful situations, while high cognition isn’t very useful in these scenarios. High cognition is more useful in low-stress situations
- Other contingencies in the model included group atmosphere, task structure, and position power
What’s the least preferred coworker model?
- What you consider your least favourite coworker is allegedly indicative of your leadership style
- Based on 5 attributes: Pleasantness, friendliness, acceptance, relaxation, and openness
What’s Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Model (life cycle model)?
- Based on the degree of relationship and tasks that are provided by the leader in a given situation
- Based on three attributes: task behaviour, relationship behaviour, and follower readiness
- End up with 4 different dynamics: telling (high affinity for tasks, low relationship), selling (low motivation, high behaviour), participating (lower task behaviour, high behaviour), and delegating (low task behaviour, low relationship requirements)
What’s House’s Path-Goal Model?
- The leader defines the path/goals and rewards employees for following the path/achieving the goals
- The leader’s role is to remove obstacles
- Outlines 4 leadership styles:
1) Supportive leadership
2) Directive leadership
3) Participative leadership
4) Achievement-oriented - Improves employee job satisfaction and performance
What’s the formula for the decision process theory?
- Decision effectiveness = Decision quality + Decision acceptance - Decision time penalty
- Often end up having to sacrifice one of the two first attributes, especially if you take more time
What are the potential strategies for making decisions?
- A1 (autocratic) - leader solves problem or makes decision unilaterally, using available info
- A2 (autocratic) - leader obtains necessary info from subordinates but then makes decision unilaterally
- C1 (individual consultation) - leader shares the problem with subordinates but then makes the decision unilaterally
- C2 (consultations) - leader shares problem with subordinates in group meeting but then makes decision unilaterally
- G2 (group) - leader shares problem with subordinates in a group meeting, and then the decision is reached through discussion to consensus
What’s the leader-member exchange theory (LMX)?
- A developmental theory of leadership
- Focuses on the individual relationships between leaders and their followers
- Leader-follower exchange viewed as social exchanges in which both groups perform effectively when the exchange is positive
What’s the Implicit Leadership Theory (Lord et al.)?
- Behaviours and traits do not make leaders unless the person perceives them as a leader
- Prototypes of a leader are formed by experience. Subsequent experiences become processed automatically
- Different prototypes exist for different contexts
What’s the Role of Self-Concept in Leadership?
- Developed by Lord, Brown, and Freiberg (1999)
- Leadership involves manipulating self-concept (align self-concept to org. commitment; emphasize possible selves)
- Employees also influence the leader’s self-concept
What are some notes regarding cross-cultural leadership?
- Some leadership behaviours translate well to other cultures (ex. transformational leadership)
- Culture can affect follower characteristics (ex. power distance) which in turn influences how well a leadership style will work
What’s the substitute for leadership theory (Kerr and Jermier)?
- There are factors that may neutralize or substitute the impacts of leadership
- Certain conditions can limit the impact of leadership
- Individual characteristics (ex. those high in conscientiousness)
- Job structure
- Org. characteristics
Research supports this theory
